1. Field of the Invention
Aspects of the present invention relate to wireless communication, and more particularly, to a technology for compressing and transmitting a header in a sensor network.
2. Description of the Related Art
A sensor network is known as a Ubiquitous Sensor Network (USN) or a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). Such sensor networks have spread across the world. Recently, based on the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.15.4 technology, an upper network technology has been standardized in ZigBee, and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is researching header compression technology for reducing an Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) header having 40 bytes in an IEEE 802.15.4 Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN) period. The IPv6 header compression technology based on IEEE 802.15.4 is described in the internet draft “http://www.ieff.org/internet-drafts/draft-ieff-6lowpan-format-13.txt” which was published as a Request for Comments (RFC) 4944 (http://www.ieff.org/rfc/rfc4944.txt) on Sep. 25, 2007.
However, nodes in a sensor network are characterized as having low-power and low-capacity, and thus it is difficult for the nodes to perform operations necessary for compression using header compression technology based on a new standard.